Hatch Escapes, an escape room design organization, has launched an ambitious to secure capital meant to create the world´s first replayable escape room. The project, known as The Ladder, will be a 90-minute, fully 🌳replayable experience in which players engage in a choice-driven, immersive narrative experience.
Within The Ladder, players will act as new employees at Nutricorp, a vitamin company with a dark secret that is gradually revealed throughout the developing storyline. The game tracks and takes players through a career that spans 50 years as you climb the corporate ladder. This begins in 1949 and ends in 1999 with each part of The Ladder represented in each decade. This includes a windowless mail room in the 50sღ, a secretarial pool in the 60s, middle management in the 70s, research and development in the 80s, and finally the corner office in the 90s.
Fans of escape room games should be excited for the eventual release of The Ladder, as Hatch Escapes is the same organization responsible for the creation of Lab Rat, an escape room that was ranked #1 in Los Angeles and #8 in the world by LA Magazine. The Ladder looks to extend how players perceive the game as a whole through replayability, primarily through introducing multiple playable characters, and allowing for a branching narrative that resolves the main sto🐲ry in different ways depending on choices made throughout.
The plan is for this to provide multiple endings, secret content, and as Tommy Wallach and Terry Rolapp from Hatch Escapes describe, “infinite puzzles to insure [sic] that you’ll never see the same material twice.” The Ladder features actor Jordan Belfi of Entourage taking on the role off a two-face corp💎orate🌱 yes-man who is both mentor and nemesis to the players. There is also an original score by jazz musician Giulio Carmassi of the Pat Metheny Unity Group.
Like most Kickstarter campaigns, there are a number of benefits for those who contribute early or at certain monetary levels, including VIP tours of the Hatch facility, invitations to the opening night party for escape room, an exclusive piece of original fiction set in the world of The Ladder, penned by the co-creator Tommy Wallach, and “immortalization within the game as an employee of Nutricorp, meaning one’s likeness and/or name would be included as part of a puzzle, or even as a fulꦅly playable avatar.
The Kickstarter campaign will continue until November 22 and hopes to secure at least $25,000. It will be interesting to see if The Ladder succeeds in its goal of creating a replayable campaign, and to see what the next step is for the escaꩵpe room industry.
Source: Hatch Escapes Press Release